Almost all marriages are only concubinages, liaisons, or rather provisional attempts, remote approximations of real marriage. The ...true nature of marriage does not conform to the paradoxes of this or that system, but rather according to all canonical and secular laws that more than one person should become only one. This ought to warrant the least possible infringement of free will, which certainly has a right to be consulted when the question at issue is whether one is to be an individual or only the integral part of a common personality; it is even hard see what legitimate argument can be raised against a marriage à quatre. But if the state must insist on holding together those attempts at marriage that have failed, it is actually obstructing marriage, for its cause would be advanced by new and possibly more successful attempts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the... infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »